BillsAttic

26/03/2023

An ancient, broken clock, perhaps two or three hundred years old lives in . The timepiece has a very visible corroded mechanism. Time stopped.

📸= Steve Tanner

19/03/2023

Painted wooden child’s pull-along toy, missing its doll’s head. Bill Mitchell loved broken things, especially toys. They spoke to him of time passing, memory and melancholy.

📸= Steve Tanner

12/03/2023

Weather Chalets, part of the archive at

It will be a nice day when the woman comes out of the chalet! These classic souvenirs are made from wood with men and women indicating the weather - many incorporate thermometers. Bill Mitchell made whole towns with these souvenirs, especially at Christmas.

📸= Steve Tanner

05/03/2023

Framed installation depicting soldiers at rest by Bill Mitchell, currently housed in .

War is a recurring theme in Bill’s work. At the age of 18, he had a very real choice as to whether to join the army or to go to art school. He was a prize-winning cadet drummer and enjoyed the camaraderie of the squad (if not the discipline!). He read many first-hand accounts of the experiences of the soldiers in war and was fascinated by the human ability to endure the most terrible challenges. He returned to this installation many times, changing the background and the central feature.

📸= Steve Tanner

26/02/2023

Bill Mitchell was not a man of faith but he was fascinated by religious imagery and the power of its stories to inspire. There are many saints, gods, angels and totems in his collection and much of his work, both public and private, made reference to religion and spirituality.


📸= Steve Tanner

19/02/2023

Pictured is Bill Mitchell’s ‘Model Ship Trapped In Icy Sea’, made of fragments of broken mirror.

Mirrors were portals to other worlds for Bill. He would hang them in trees, had thirty suspended in his bathroom, and strung them in his garden to make the light dance. He of course used them in his collage work too.

📸= Steve Tanner

12/02/2023

is a residency space at in Redruth, for any artist or collective.

Artists can apply for a residency, which can last from one day to an entire month, to explore and even re-purpose some of the artefacts, generating new artwork that contributes to the legacy of Bill's Attic.

📸= Steve Tanner

https://www.krowji.org.uk/bills-attic/

05/02/2023

Wings featured regularly in Bill’s installations because Bill believed flight represented creativity, ideas and imagination.

These feathers came from a peacock which mysteriously arrived in the garden of one of Bill's friends shortly after her husband had died. The bird would appear at her window daily, shouting for attention and food, until he met his death after a chance meeting with a fox. The friend donated the feathers to Bill’s collection so the bird's beauty could continue to be admired.

📸= Steve Tanner

📸= Steve Tanner

29/01/2023

The last remaining view of theatre-maker Bill Mitchell's incredible, creative space has been captured in and can now be downloaded for FREE from SideQuest, making accessible to anyone in the world with an Oculus Quest headset.
Please download and let us know what you think?

A place that is no more, shown in a way that has not before been, for audiences who have not before seen... Bill's Attic is a physical and digital resource of incredible artefacts; a gift for the artist in everyone, to inspire a fersh generation of creators, makers, thinkers and radicals.

22/01/2023

Bill Mitchell's projects were born in his attic, a private creation space which housed his extraordinary lifetime’s collection of artefacts: bones, saints, shells, bells, toys, spoons, snow globes, archaeology… all arranged with idiosyncratic and exquisite care in the attic of his house. The attic, now housed at Krowji in Redruth, is open to artists to visit and respond to the physical and virtual collections.

15/01/2023

These early 20th-century lead-painted, toy nurses live in .
There are numerous boxes of lead figures in Bill’s collection, carefully labelled with Dymo tape: soldiers, cavalry (both horse and camel), Zulus, nurses, stretcher-bearers, cowboys, agricultural workers as well as many very fine, German-made, plastic figures designed to populate model train installations. These tiny people made regular appearances in Bill’s installations.
📸= Steve Tanner

25/12/2022

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM BILL’S ATTIC.

Bill liked to road-test several Christmas puddings in the weeks before December 25th, he was also a formidable cake decorator. Over the years, Bill created Christmas cakes with surreal scenes - Desert Oases, The Father Christmases' Union Meeting, Extreme Dinghy Racing, Beauty and the Beast, Tippu's Tiger, Excalibur, Aladdin's Lamp and many others.

Here’s Bill with his Christmas cake in 1994.